I Is For Ice Cream

Little Man and I are dipping our toes into the homeschooling pool. While homeschooling isn't quite on the horizon (yet), I knew that it was important for us to get on a learning schedule during the week. We are still hitting the pool and parks and doing all sorts of summery things, but we are also doing one hour of school time a day M-TH.  I was totally nervous about the whole thing, and when I'm worried, I tend to eat. So, naturally, our first week was based on all things ice cream.

The good news: Little Man LOVED it. Seriously loved it. In fact, we were both so excited about our "school time" in the mornings that I forgot to feed him breakfast every day last week. Thank goodness for yogurt at 11am.

Here's what we did for our Ice Cream week.  Keep in mind that I did about 15 minutes of prep time on Sunday to plan out activities for our entire week. That was it. I'm into keeping it easy peasy around here, folks.

Here are our activities, in no particular order.  Drum roll, please.

- Daily: practice writing upper and lower case I's. We used Handwriting Without Tears style, since that is what our school district will teach him.  The first day, I dashed out the letters for him, and the rest of the days he did it freehand on his own.

- Daily: a page or two from Wreck This Journal. We are doing the orange one. I know that I could probably make my own pages, but I grabbed this from B&N the last time we were there, thinking it might be fun. You guys...it is SO MUCH FUN. Today we rubbed dirt all over a page and then licked a sucker and make "tongue art" on another page. He thinks it is hilarious and I love that it works on our imagination, fine motor and even large motor skills.

- We made our own ice cream in sandwich bags. Used this recipe.

- Cut out ice cream cones (triangles) out of construction paper, along with scoops of ice cream (circles out of construction paper). Little Man helped me trace/freehand the shapes and cut them out. We did addition and subtraction exercises with our scoops of ice cream. After that, we decorated a few cones - one to hang on the school room wall and one for Daddy to take to his office.

- This dot-to-dot ice cream cone sheet.

- We made up a story, and typed it on the computer as we wrote it, about Mr. Freeze stealing ice cream from a local ice cream shop. Thankfully, Super Jackson was there to save the day. After we wrote the story, we both drew and colored the characters and settings of the story and used them to put on a puppet show of our story for Daddy when he got home from work. This one was probably everyone's favorite from the week's activities.

Our story and drawings

Since it was the 4th of July weekend, we didn't get a chance to build our own ice cream shop out of blocks or have ice cream for breakfast like the library book we checked out, but I'm still counting this week as a huge success.

This week we are perfecting the picnic. I'll be sure to post the activities for the week soon!